During some 20 years of research into thresholds of visual performance we have required to explore deeply the developing knowledge in both physiology, neurophysiology and, to a lesser extent, anatomy of primate vision. Over the last few years, as interest in computer vision has grown, it has become clear to us that a number of aspects of image processing and coding by human vision are very simple yet powerful, but appear to have been largely overlooked or misrepresented in classical computer vision literature. The paper discusses some important aspects of early visual processing. It then endeavours to demonstrate some of the simple yet powerful coding procedures which we believe are or may be used by human vision and which may be applied directly to computer vision.